Amazon Announces Dash, A New Way To Shop at AmazonFresh

It looks like that it is not only FireTV that Amazon has released in the past week. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), apart from FireTV, has announced Amazon Dash, a shopping device that it’s offering for free to a limited number of AmazonFresh users. Amazon calls it a “magic wand”, and while it doesn’t exactly look like Harry Potter’s wand, it is a 6-inch long plastic stick that includes a LED scanner and a microphone for voice search, which helps you to add items to your shopping cart on AmazonFresh.

How Amazon Dash works

Amazon Dash comes with two small buttons, one for scanning barcodes and the other for voice-recognition capabilities. Once you add the items to your shopping list, you can then view them on your desktop or mobile device and then purchase or schedule a delivery.

This new offering by Amazon is aimed at enhancing the shopping experience, making it speedier. It connects to your home’s WiFi network, and once connected to your computer or mobile phone, you can view the list and order items from there. No longer do you manually need to search for items and then add them to the cart. However, to use Dash, you need to be in the three AmazonFresh markets: Southern California, San Francisco, or Seattle. Since it is limited to these certain areas, it won’t be very useful for users in other areas. Also those looking to get their hands on this need to be existing AmazonFresh members.

If you don’t have an exclusive invitation code from Amazon, then you won’t be able to get your hands on this free Dash device. Many users might also complain that Dash is not that revolutionary, as they can always create a grocery list directly on their smartphones. Amazon with this device only hopes to make grocery shipping easier, faster and more convenient.